Go for the gold: What to Cook This Weekend

August 6, 2021

Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Sue Li. Prop stylist: Nicole Louie.

What to Cook This Weekend

By Sam Sifton

Good morning. Dorie Greenspan is in The Times this week with a marvelous column about her granddaughter's first birthday and the little cakes — Baby Cakes (above), she calls them — she's making to mark the occasion. They'll be her granddaughter's first experience with sugar. Big day!

It'd be great to have Dorie as a grandmother. And her recipe is a dream: a tender, chewy cake that's substantial but light, vanilla- and rose-scented, with a strawberry in the center of each one and a white chocolate glaze on top. Dorie bakes them in mini-muffin tins so that they're small enough for a baby's hands. Do the same yourself even if there's no baby around. They're an amazing taste of summer that you could bring to a potluck or cookout, the perfect ending to a meal of barbecued chicken, grilled corn and green tomato salad.

So long as I'm baking and grilling this weekend, I'd love to fry some Colombian beef and potato empanadas as well. I could see my way to making a dinner of seared scallops with jammy cherry tomatoes, with a lemon sheet cake with raspberry whipped cream for dessert.

French toast amandine for Sunday morning? I'd serve that with fruit salad: a bunch of plums and oranges and strawberries under a big splash of lime juice, no recipe required. Then maybe a grilled chicken salad for lunch, with avocado, lime and lots of soft-boiled eggs? And curried goat for dinner, with rice and mango slaw? (That recipe for the goat also works great with lamb, if you're wondering.)

There are thousands and thousands more recipes to cook this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. (Check out these grilled pork chops with cherry sauce.) It is true that you need a subscription to access them. This is a fair trade in our book. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. So, please, if you haven't done so already, I hope you will subscribe today.

You can check us out on social media as well. We maintain accounts on Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. (I'm out there myself: @samsifton.)

And do reach out if you find yourself in trouble, either in your kitchen or on our site and apps. Write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back you, I promise. (You can also send me apples or arrows: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I read every letter sent.)

Now, it's a far cry from tea cakes and pickled herring, but Sarah Braunstein has a good short story in The New Yorker right now, "Superstition."

It's Independence Day in Jamaica, where they're celebrating 59 years of freedom from British colonial rule. So here's Early B, "History of Jamaica."

Newsletter news: Soumya Karlamangla is The Times's new California Today writer and will send dispatches from the state to your inbox every weekday, if you're interested. Please consider signing up here.

Finally, from the wayback machine, via The Stacks Reader, here's Jennifer Allen in New York Magazine, April 9, 1984, on David Mamet and the opening of "Glengarry Glen Ross" on Broadway. Everyone's so young! Enjoy that and I will, as the saying goes, see you on Sunday.

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